Week 5 Chronicles: Hymns Old and New

Week 5 Chronicles is an occasional series on experimental worship formats whenever there is a fifth Sunday in a month. Someone once said that a hymn is theology set to music. Others say that, in contrast to much of modern worship’s being deeply personal, a hymn is an expression of objective praise. That is not […]

Music in Its Rightful Place: The Importance of Capacity and Context

In our last worship leader’s mentoring session, we talked about the role of music in worship. In the modern worship landscape, music and worship are almost synonymous. Of course, the more informed amongst us are keenly aware of the separation, but often struggle to articulate the difference or to hold the tension. I posited seemingly […]

Tools for the Non-Musical Worship Leader

I was recently reading Chris Falson’s old book Planted by the Water and came across this (at page 150) which I thought was interesting: It is not essential for a worship leader to be a skilled musician. A reliance on skill and talent hinders the move of the Holy Spirit. Some of the best worship leaders […]

From the Archives: Sometimes Bossanova Just Happens – Lessons from Your Worst Nightmare

Today, I thought I’d share one of my favourite posts so far… I love this clip of Martin Smith leading worship, because it goes to show that no worship leader is immune from the silliest of mistakes: I remember one time when I was leading worship and we had just transitioned into the song “At […]

An Adventure in Missing the Point

Today Ray Badham taught about building a worship team at Arrows College. We were asked to brainstorm along the lines of who the stakeholders were in our worship service. One by one, the students called out ‘worship leader’, ‘musicians’, ‘vocalists’, ‘sound technicians’, ‘dancers’, ‘visuals’ etc. I thought I was being pretty savvy by calling out […]

Audition Success!

I was really thrilled yesterday to get an email yesterday as follows: Congratulations! You have been successful in the FCC worship audition. Welcome to the team! It was a good thing my wife ordered me some in-ear earphones from Catch of the Day! My joining the Faith Community Church worship team is significant to me […]

Sushi and the Art of Worship Leading

Over the weekend, I watched a documentary about the world’s greatest sushi chef called Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Whilst I like to stay on top of food trends, this was the first time I had ever heard of Jiro Ono. Jiro is an 85 year old sushi master who owns a 10-seater restaurant in the […]

What Type of Worship Leader Are You?

Years ago, I came across John de Jong’s catalogue of different types of worship leaders (from his book Riding the Storm), which I thought was rather amusing. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but in the process, he makes some quite incisive observations about worship leading methodology. So here are the categories, but I want to just make the […]

Pressing In

Wow, it’s been a number of days since my last post. I’ve had a pretty busy week leading up to a trial last Friday. I haven’t conducted a trial in ages so I was a bit nervous, but I’m glad to say that God is good and we won the case, with the Tribunal giving […]